“Now,” said the general, over vidscreens system-wide three days after first strike. “We negotiate a lasting peace, or we die trying.”
In those three days of combat, all aboard the shipyards had alternated between volatile bursts of celebration and anxiety—more drinking, more quarrelling, more breakneck labors over wounded ships back in port. All, that is, except one: Imbra, who slept and work and ate and drank amid the other mechanics’ frenzy like a man disembodied, wandering at a remove from creatures so wildly impassioned he almost couldn’t believe they were of the same species, let alone tribe. But once the battle was over, Miha clapped Imbra’s back just the same, and reassured the northerner that he hadn’t missed out on much, not being able to weep as openly for the protracted lease on life that one little ship had brought to all the rest.
Imbra nodded at the gesture but couldn’t bring himself to reply, a lump lodged in his throat because the dread still lay within him—deep down, only lacking the right physical response to flourish. He kept replaying footage from the Jalfreda instead: the slow approach of Allegiance, the sudden strike of the EM wave, the darkness, and then, in the midst of it, the slightest movement: the ejection of a lifepod, barely noticeable, from XF32.
Paloma’s lifepod resurfaced a week after the ceasefire—a whole week in which his ship’s maneuver had been chalked up to General Asarus’s craftiness, her unparalleled head for deep strategy beneath all her openness with the fleet about tactics. Only Ren—also alive, if shaken up from her time in the field—suspected otherwise. Within hours of her return to the shipyards, she found Imbra running diagnostics routines and stood at the edge of his work module, her lean frame as tense with anger as Paloma’s, on the surface, had been.
“He’s alive,” said Imbra. “I know he is.”
“He’d better be,” she said. “Easy enough to toss you out an airlock, if he’s not.” Imbra notched a brow. “Lot of hatred from a southerner. You must really love him.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said. “Declaws don’t vote in the south. They don’t get a say. They get to shut up and give back to society until their time in the sun is done.”
“Does it really matter who contributes, so long as the war comes to an end?”
“Yes,” she said and clearly meant it. Imbra’s lips twitched, but he held back a smile.
“Credit’s all his,” he said. “I don’t want it. Once he gets back, he’ll be a hero. More than he already is. They’ll name schools after him, promote him two grades. Salary for life.”
Ren didn’t look convinced, and Imbra didn’t blame her—not even when Paloma returned to the land of the living, haggard and haunted from his time in stasis. Certainly, the celebrations for the Novuni’s latest hero were wild enough. His name resounded through the system far and wide enough. And the accolades poured on him were lavish enough, too.
But in the process, in private, Paloma had told someone in command the full story.
Next thing Imbra knew, he was standing before General Asarus herself, on the bridge of the N.S.S. Ragnara.
“I could have you thrown to the courts, or straight out an airlock, for what you did,” she said. “On your own, without oversight, without permission.”
“Yes sir,” said Imbra.
“But since it doesn’t really change anything in the long run, you might as well live.” With that, she pinned bridge crew insignia on his collar and assigned him a bunk on the ship.
3.
Even the planet runs in circles.
Mother help the fool
Who thinks in straight lines.
—Novuni Proverb
In person, General Asarus remained larger than life, an illusion aided in no small part by a uniform and unwavering gaze that commanded attention, despite the bun crowning her flat-twist hair coming no higher than the shoulders of some of her bridge crew.
Imbra, his own coils a wild tangle more days than not, took with difficulty to the standards of dress and conduct aboard the N.S.S. Ragnara. The ways of the valley—Biggs’ ease with the law; Tripp and Hurley’s excesses on the right side of it—he’d been able to manipulate with only minor physical concessions, while even the shipyards had their share of play, from Grott’s teasing to Miha’s unhinged banter. But the stringency of life aboard a military vessel had yet to offer any easy evasions. Every day shift at six bells, Imbra stood for inspection—and failed, miserably—and after reprimands and first meal seated himself at eight bells at the back of the war room, reviewing schema after schema littered in the jargon of half a dozen subdisciplines he could barely identify, let alone parse.
“I’m just a valley hick with a knack for machines,” he said on the first day, while posing a question about a recurring symbol to the shipmate beside him.
Lieutenant Bastrus answered his question, but not before pinning him with a look that plainly read well, try harder.
And Imbra did, though his head felt sluggish for reasons that neither the declaw nor the lingering hearing loss could fully explain. He ran simulations of ambush paths, decoys, and direct, full-frontal assaults across the asteroid field and gas giants, trying to beat an AI in scenarios where the Allegiance had prepped an invading force to overwhelm the system on what civilian news was already triumphantly calling Treaty Day. In every case,
